'Words Massive With the Increment of Years'

“It teaches us to believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and raises us above that low and servile fear, which bows only to present power and upstart authority.” 

The first classical writer I can remember reading was, unsurprisingly, Homer, in a children’s edition. The Odyssey was treated as an adventure story – which it is -- not unlike Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe – though watered down, cleaned up, made palatable to a twentieth-century neophyte reader raised on cartoons. A few years later I would read Lattimore’s and Fitzgerald’s translations.

 

William Hazlitt’s passage quoted above, from “On Classical Education” (1815), likely sounds grandiose to contemporary readers. I was a lazy student of Latin and never studied Greek. My understanding of Homer and other Greek and Roman writers has been filtered through centuries of subsequent readers. In the case of Homer, I’m lining up behind Alexander Pope, James Joyce and Christopher Logue. All testified through their examples that “there is something really great and excellent in the world.” They suggest that literature is not a game preserve. It is open to all of us. No need to pass a test or pay a membership fee. If you can ignore his snobbery, Hazlitt is good on the pretensions associated with literature and education in general:

 

“Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men, and which degenerates into obstinate prejudice or petulant fickleness of opinion, according to the natural sluggishness or activity of their minds.”

 

One needn’t be an autodidact to hold “obstinate prejudice[s].” I rank myself among those “persons without [formal] education.” David Leightty is an attorney and poet in Louisville, Ky. “The Classics” is from Knowing That Most Things Break (David Robert Books, 2023):

 

“The centuries’ accumulated store

Of reverent study bides in these dense books—

Dense with millennia. In lifting these

The hand lifts time itself. Who were those men?

No telling. Legend vested them obscures;

The gist of long tradition shifts their mien.

So too their works. A reading bends beneath

Words massive with the increment of years.”

'The Conjunction of Dreaming and Ruling'

Dr. Johnson famously contributed several couplets to Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society” (1764), including: 

“How small of all that human hearts endure

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,

Our own felicity we make or find.”

 

Five years later Johnson told Boswell in conversation: “Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.” We can safely nod our heads in agreement. In the eighteenth century in Great Britain, such sentiments could prove seditious and be punished accordingly. History has substantiated Johnson’s observations. Governments and their enthusiastic or coerced citizens created the abattoir that was the twentieth century and have continued the tradition into the twenty-first.

 

A reader complains about the absence of politics at Anecdotal Evidence and I thank him for noticing. It’s not a compelling subject. Busybodies with big ideas, unafraid to impose them on others, are dangerous. In Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000), Robert Conquest -- poet and historian, Jeremiah of Communism and its evils – writes:

 

“[I]t is no part of its culture that a government elected by a bare majority, or even by a fairly large majority, is thereby empowered to totally reconstruct the social and political order by sacrificing the minority. That great political philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that for some people government is ‘an instrument of passion; the art of politics

is to inflame and direct desire.’ For others, which is to say, in general, for those who have a traditional regard for the unity and continuity of a culture, the business of government is something different: ‘to restrain, to deflate, to pacify, and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down,’ on the grounds that, as Oakeshott puts it, ‘the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.’”

 

Conquest is quoting Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962; rev. 1991). Elsewhere in his book Conquest writes:

 

“The revolutionary believed it to be in the nature of things that dictatorship and terror are needed if the good of humanity is to be served, just as the Aztec priests believed themselves to be entirely justified in ripping the hearts out of thousands of victims, since had they not done so, the sun would have gone out, a far worse catastrophe for mankind. In either case, the means are acceptable, being inevitable. . .”

"Meaning One Thing at a Time'

A reader asks if I remember diagramming sentences. In math I was competent and uninspired but almost anything with words constituted play time. In short, I loved diagramming sentences. I think Mrs. Whistler, my sixth-grade teacher, enjoyed calling on me to take a sentence apart on the blackboard and reassemble it in a manner almost mathematical – probably my first insight into logic. She appreciated the pleasure I took in diagramming, a pleasure not shared by most of my classmates. Whenever Hollywood gives us a professor furiously solving equations on the blackboard, I’m back in Pearl Road Elementary School.

For those unfamiliar with the practice, diagramming meant making grammar visible, pictorially displaying the parts of a sentence and relating them to each other using connecting lines. Subject-verb-object was no longer drily theoretical but as vivid as arithmetic. It was like furniture bought at Ikea: “some assembly required.” To this day I think of a sentence as an assembly of parts. Anyone can put them together but what is the optimal combination?

Clive James in Cultural Amnesia (2007) introduced me to Pedro Henriquez Ureña, the great Dominican philologist. “It is always encouraging to hear what you know by instinct,” James writes, “resoundingly formulated by an authoritative figure, so that you can draw upon the memory for a lifetime.” Most of us grow up thinking we understand the language into which we were born. And we do, but how does it work? How do we recognize confusing or ambiguous language? How can it be corrected? How do we recognize lies and incoherence when expressed in seemingly straightforward language? Grammar is more than academic. It’s an ever-present gift, often under threat, to be cherished and preserved. Here is the conclusion to James’ essay:

“Writers don’t read just for the story: they read for the way the story is written, and the way the sentences are put together is the information that sticks. It helps, however, to have been taught in the first place what a sentence is: something that conveys information only by the rules it keeps. Grammar is a mechanism for meaning one thing at a time. Without it, you can’t even manage to be deliberately ambiguous, although to be ambiguous by accident is a result all too easily attained.”

'Old Age Had Been Foreseen'

Deciding which of Chekhov’s more than five-hundred stories is the finest is a happily futile task. He is a reader’s pipe dream: a great writer who was prolific (though he died at age forty-four). My sentimental favorite is “My Life” (1896), a novella written during his Melikhovo period. Misail Poloznev is a young nobleman who resolves to become a member of the proletariat, though not out of revolutionary zeal. He rejects the life he inherited but without self-dramatization. His motives are private, not histrionic, and everyone, even his father, mocks him and fails to understand Misail’s choice. By the end he has lost the woman he loves and made his sister’s life difficult, but we admire him. His life has been lonely and difficult but he has achieved integrity and a certain moral eminence. I remembered Chekhov’s story when reading Len Krisak’s similarly titled “A Life,” published in Pulse Beat Poetry Journal: 

“The streets, albeit not with gold, were paved,

The path both broad and even; wide the way

And easy, with no uniform to don.

By almost nothing was he put upon.

Old age had been foreseen, and so he saved,

The modicum matched with its rainy day.

The sheets were clean, as were the neat clothes worn

From bawling babe, to teen, to man, and on.

Few were the oaths required to be sworn,

And almost nothing had been sacrificed,

Or found worthwhile, or worth the dying for.

As to the depredations brought by war,

None had been undergone. All things sufficed,

Since almost nothing crucial had been needed.

Yes, easy, broad, and even, he conceded,

Though through it all, what all of it had meant

He couldn’t say. No, not in any event.”

 

In seventeen lines, Krisak encapsulates a life, as Chekhov does in “My Life” (and many other stories). That life is conventional, unremarkable, perhaps blameless. But the character described suspects he has missed something: “almost nothing had been sacrificed.” There’s no mention of youthful dreams, whether accomplished or lost. By the end he has not understood what it was all about. An unhappier character than Misail, his life was not hurtful or destructive but disappointing. We find similar narratives in Tolstoy, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Richard Yates. Chekhov wrote in another story, “The Lady with the Little Dog”:

 

“And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.”

'A Continent of Dulness and Futility'

Most serious readers, I suspect, have enthusiasms they recognize as virtually indefensible. It would never occur to me, for instance, to mount a solemn defense of Charles Montagu Doughty, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), or urge readers to take on the book. His prose is too eccentric to attract and hold even the most patient and persevering of readers. Even I can’t stomach his poetry, though Guy Davenport urged The Dawn in Britain (1906) on me. In the same category I would put the fiction of Henry Green (by the way, an admirer of Doughty’s) and even the later novels and The American Scene of Henry James. 

Another such outcast dear to me is Walter Savage Landor, especially his epigrams and his major prose work, Imaginary Conversations (1824-29). I can think of few writers less congenial to twenty-first-century readers. I enjoy him and mostly keep my mouth shut. Now I’ve happened on Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (1890) by W.E. Henley, author of the sturdiest of warhorses, “Invictus.” Henley describes his collection as “a mosaic of scraps and shreds recovered from the shot rubbish of some fourteen years of journalism,” but he has occasionally provocative things to say about dozens of writers, including Landor:

 

“To the many, Landor has always been more or less unapproachable, and has always seemed more or less shadowy and unreal.  To begin with, he wrote for himself and a few others, and principally for himself.  Then, he wrote waywardly and unequally as well as selfishly; he published pretty much at random; the bulk of his work is large; and the majority has passed him by for writers more accessible and work less freakish and more comprehensible.”

 

 No argument here. No one at my university mentioned Landor. I had to discover him myself, years later. He was a great blank in the middle of the nineteenth century. Curiosity drove me; Landor’s sensibility kept me coming back. Henley is witty in his distaste for Landor, and I feel no urge to fight back. Of the work he writes   

 

“[I]t is peopled chiefly with abstractions: bearing noble and suggestive names but all surprisingly alike in stature and feature, all more or less incapable of sustained emotion and even of logical argument, all inordinately addicted to superb generalities and a kind of monumental skittishness, all expressing themselves in a style whose principal characteristic is a magnificent monotony, and all apparently the outcome of a theory that to be wayward is to be creative, that human interest is a matter of apophthegms and oracular sentences, and that axiomatic and dramatic are identical qualities and convertible terms.”

 

He’s not entirely wrong. If I don’t sound like a cheerleader it’s because I acknowledge that Landor is, as they say, “an acquired taste” – like snails or Scotch. And Henley writes well. He tells us some readers judge Landor “a continent of dulness and futility.” That’s very good. In the second of his two paragraphs, Henley writes of Landor’s drama, which I have never read:

 

“To many there is nothing Greek about his dramatic work except the absence of stage directions; and to these that quality of ‘Landorian abruptness’ which seems to Mr. Sidney Colvin to excuse so many of its shortcomings is identical with a certain sort of what in men of lesser mould is called stupidity.”

'He Took to Learning for It Own Sake'

Almost half a century ago, in a small town in Northwestern Ohio, I knew a man who read Joseph Conrad the way some people read their Bible – out of love, not obligation. He was not otherwise a literary man. He was about seventy, a lifelong bachelor who retired from a big insurance company a few years earlier and had lived in a succession of small Ohio towns, surrounded by vast fields of corn, soybeans and sugar beets. I was editor of the town's weekly newspaper and visited him at home to interview him about some unliterary matter I no longer remember, and saw on a table in his living room the twenty-four-volume Canterbury edition of Conrad’s Complete Works. 

He told me he was never much of a reader but had discovered Conrad as a teenager and recognized his sole literary affinity. He claimed to have read little else besides the great Pole. I had a copy of Ian Watt’s recently published Conrad in the Nineteenth Century and offered to loan it to him but he wasn’t interested. He had no curiosity about the ancillary literature, biography and critical works. He impressed me as a quietly happy man. He was delighted when I told him Nostromo was my favorite Conrad title. He may have been the purest reader I have ever met. Years later I interviewed an aspiring novelist in residence at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. On the wall above the desk in his cabin he kept a framed photograph of Conrad, so I told him about the reader back in Ohio and he told me the Polish novelist was “like a god.”

 

I thought of these men while reading a 1985 interview with V.S. Pritchett (1900-97), the finest British book critic and short-story writer of the last century. He recalls his Uncle Arthur, a carpenter, never wealthy or formally educated:

 

“[O]ne other thing which has never ceased to surprise me, he had read that extraordinary psychological classic of the 17th century, [Robert] Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which is the most extraordinary book of classical learning about neurosis and all that sort of thing, primitive psychology, early psychology. And he used to read this with absolute delight, with great pleasure — how much he understood I don’t know.”

 

Pritchett remembered his Dickensian Uncle Arthur in the first volume of his memoirs, A Cab at the Door (1968):

 

“A passion for education seized him. He took to learning for its own sake, and not in order to rise in the world. He belonged – I now see – to the dying race of craftsmen. So he looked for a book that was suited to his energetic, yet melancholy and quasi-scientific temperament. At last he found it: he taught himself to read by using Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. This rambling and eccentric compendium of the illnesses of the brain and heart was exactly suited to his curious mind. He reveled in it. ‘Look it up in Burton, lad,’ he’d say when I was older. ‘What’s old Burton say?’ He would quote it all round the house. Burton came into every argument. And he would add, from his own experience, a favorite sentence: “Circumstances alter cases.’”

 

This is a rare and convincing testimonial to the power of reading. Something similar happened to Eric Hoffer when he discovered Montaigne’s essays. I’ve read thousands of books since I learned to read almost seventy years ago and that, certainly, has had a cumulative impact on my life – all that time I could have spent bowling or playing video games -- but I can’t identify a single volume or writer that possessed such transformational power. Books have populated my interior landscape, overhauled my imagination, buffered me against loneliness and despair, kept me amused, honed my critical faculties – but in what sense are such things life-changing? In the aggregate, they mean something; in isolation, little or nothing. That I can recall much Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot is a great comfort because it leaves me no excuse for boredom, but, of course, I can also pull up lyrics to pop songs and commercial jingles from 1961. So what? But sometimes I suspect we live among savants.

'Farewell the Castle in the Air'

I came late to Louis MacNeice – preoccupied as I was, like many before me, with his friend W.H. Auden – and have tried to make up for my tardiness by reading him closely and often. In 1937 he tramped around the Hebrides, like Johnson and Boswell, with the intention of writing a travel book. The result, I Crossed the Minch, is loosely organized and a little disappointing. There’s something forced about the narrative, as though MacNeice sensed he couldn't rival the brilliance of his poetry and, incidentally, had to justify his publisher’s advance.

The Minch is the strait northwest of Scotland that separates the mainland from the Outer Hebrides. This is ripe subject matter. The best travel writers – Charles Doughty, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Zbigniew Herbert – don’t produce dutiful, passive transcripts of experience. Often they are on a quest for knowledge or enlightenment. They mingle history and close observation. They are autobiographical in the sense that Montaigne’s essays are autobiographical.

MacNeice occasionally crosses the paths described in Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell’s A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). Like his predecessors, MacNeice is democratically erudite. Along the way he alludes to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donald Duck, the Powys brothers, cricket, Sunlight Soap, Charles Laughton’s role as Rembrandt and much Irish, Scottish and English history. He works in passages written as verse and inserts others parodying the styles of Walter Pater, D.H. Lawrence, Yeats and Hemingway (“He put his hands in his pockets and opened the door with his knee. He went out into the rain. The rain was raining.”) MacNeice has a sense of humor. He writes:

“After lunch I walked up to Arnabost and took the road to the left, leaving it at Grishipol (which means Pig Steading) to visit the house where Dr. Johnson stayed. The house is beautifully situated by the sea—of grey stone, with no roof, but the three broad chimneys remain. It is not a big house and is full of weeds and dung. In holes in the wall there are pigeons’ nests, which contained baby pigeons covered with yellow down. If it had been Shelley who stayed here, how people would gush about this place.”

Shelley is likely the most irritating poet in the language, at least before the birth of Sharon Olds, and it’s nice to see MacNeice take a shot at the narcissistic twit. He shares Auden’s northern temperament. A subdued melancholy in his work is muted by a gift for celebration (not unlike Auden and Johnson – especially the latter). He is a genial man comfortable in solitude. His humor can be somber in the Irish fashion. In this passage from late in I Crossed the Minch, I admire the way MacNeice simulates one’s progression from callow to seasoned while retaining the sense of improvised Irish gusto:

“When I was nineteen and twenty I was very excited if I walked up a road. Because, like a character in G.K. Chesterton, I expected some adventure round the corner. But now I realize that, contrary to adolescent expectations, adventures are not things which happen at random. The globe-trotter, the flaneur, the wandering dilettante of sensations, these are not the people who get adventures. An adventure must be important to the adventurer. You cannot collect them with scissors and a pot of paste. You must work for them. They must be related to your work and come to you in the course of it. Farewell the castle in the air which never saw hod or trowel.”

'The Aesthetic Blush'

One of my favorite essays was written about prose by a poet. No paradox there. Apart from the strictures of meter and rhyme, there’s no good reason prose can’t be composed as musically and concisely as poetry. Years ago, Dave Lull sent me a link to Donald Justice’s “The Prose Sublime,” first published in the Michigan Quarterly Review in 1988 and collected in A Donald Justice Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1991). It’s an essay I periodically reread, in part because Justice cites the occasional excellence of the prose of Sherwood Anderson, an early enthusiasm of mine. I also like that he explicitly rejects “purple prose,” the flowery stuff soft-headed writers think is poetic. One quality of good prose is that it adheres, like lichen to a rock, to precise thought. 

I want to point out the witty subtitle Justice gives his essay: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” Justice is suggesting that our expectations of prose are modest or even nonexistent compared to poetry. Prose is deemed utilitarian, a purposeful avoidance of frills. It means business. Poetry is lightweight and frivolous. But one of our deepest sources of joy is language excellently deployed, regardless of the form. “The reaction to prose as to poetry,” Justice writes, “proves in experience to be much the same, a sort of transport, a frisson, a thrilled recognition, which, ‘flashing forth at the right moment,’ as Longinus has it, “scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt.”

 

 Some of our best writers of prose were poets. I’ll cite only Yvor Winters, Louise Bogan and J.V. Cunningham. Take this from Cunningham’s “The Journal of John Cardan” (1961), collected in The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (2024). Note the absence of gushing and the tight focus:  

 

“So we save ourselves from the sentimental death of the hearts, and at the same time protect ourselves from engrossment in our wayward wishes. For a man must live divided against himself: only the selfishly insane can integrate experience to the heart’s desire, and only the emotionally sterile would not wish to.”

 

And this: “No dignity, except in silence; no virtue, except in sinuous exacting speech.”

 

Justice’s subtitle reminds me of Guy Davenport’s Objects on a Table (1998), subtitled Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature. In his study of still-life painting, he refers to his four lectures as a “disarray of perceptions and conjunctions in which the unlikelihood of harmony vies with the promise of coherence.” This, incidentally, nicely describes Davenport’s customary artistic strategy (in essays, stories, poems and paintings). We might call his a unifying imagination. He doesn’t fall for the modern temptation to see chaos everywhere – nor does Justice. Davenport juxtaposes disparate objects, words and images, and finds in them a humble, reassuring, sometimes poignant balance. Sensibilities like Davenport’s and Justice’s don’t settle for lazy, passive nihilism. Here’s how Justice closes his essay:

 

“[C]onnections, if any, remain unstated, likewise meanings. As used to be remarked of poems, such passages resist paraphrase. Their power is hidden in mystery. There is, at most, an illusion of seeing momentarily into the heart of things – and the moment vanishes. It is this, perhaps, which produces the aesthetic blush.”

'Everyone Believes He or She Could Write a Book'

I love trolling through old magazines, not so much in search of treasure as to gauge the values of our forebears. What did writers and editors, and presumably readers, find interesting and important? Taste is notoriously transient. Most of it is rooted in fashion and peer pressure, what other folks like.

The July 14, 1956, issue of The Saturday Review, published seventy years ago, opens with the “Trade Winds” column of Bennett Cerf (1898-1971). As a kid, I knew him as a panelist on the quiz show What’s My Line? Later I learned he was cofounder of Random House, publisher of the Modern Library I relied on for my education. Cerf published Faulkner, John O’Hara and Whitaker Chambers’ Witness. We can blame him for publishing Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Cerf’s column is feeble stuff: 

“Hard-pressed publishers have come up with a lucrative and relatively new gimmick in recent months: histories of great corporations, financed by the corporations themselves. The publishers usually supply the author, edit the text, and make a token distribution in bookstores after publication; the corporation buys between five and fifty thousand copies at a stipulated price, thus assuring the publisher a profit before he begins. . . There is nothing wrong with business of this sort—provided the public is let in on the essential details.”

 

Well, yes – and no. Next up is “The Literary Life at Seventy-Five” by a name new to me, William McFee (1881-1966), a prolific writer of sea stories. Judging by his article, McFee was a cultivated man with a sense of humor. He makes observations similar to those I have made:

 

“Writers are not highly regarded in America. I know this sounds odd, but it is true. Everyone uses a pen, and everyone believes he or she could write a book if there were only time. Recently I heard the expression, ‘I could write a book about that place.’ Another person, after reading a book about his own profession, said he could write a better book. The point is, each assumed as a matter of course he could write a book, but he would never claim to be able to carve a statue or compose music or paint a picture or design a building. Even if they do not offer to write a book they have a plot for a novel, which they present to a writer, free.”

 

Of all the book reviewers I recognize the names of William Peden, Edmund Fuller, Paul Arthur Schilpp and Meyer Levin. Of the writers under review, even fewer names. A pleasant surprise is the byline of Whitney Balliett, who would soon become a staff writer and jazz critic for The New Yorker. His piece is titled “Billie, Big Bill, and Jelly Roll” – that is, Billie Holiday, Big Bill Broonzy and Jelly Roll Morton, all of whom had recently had their autobiographies published. Balliett is honest and never patronizing:

 

“Three quite different, though complementary, autobiographies have recently been published here and in England, and taken together, they provide an invaluable reflection of the Negro jazz musician. All three books are products of collaboration and as a result they vary as much in quality as content.”

 

Of the three, I remember Morton’s book being the most interesting. He was a raconteur, a one-time pimp, a storyteller and a brilliant composer. He had died sick and broke in 1941. Balliett’s verdict: “Morton gave the American Dream an awful pummeling before it cut him down.”

'Nothing So Much as Mincing Poetry'

While reading the history plays again I’ve been keeping a list of peculiar, amusing, exotic-sounding words, and words I don’t remember having encountered before. I love these choice little discoveries. My only disappointment is that such words are virtually unusable. They would be gibberish to most people, whether in writing or speech, and would end up sounding pretentious and incoherent. Here’s a passage from Henry IV, Part 1 (Act 3, Scene 1), in which Hotspur is complaining about Owen Glendower’s bloviation: 

“Sometime he angers me

With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant,

Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,

And of a dragon and a finless fish,

A clip-winged griffin and a moulten raven,

A couching lion and a ramping cat,

And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff

As puts me from my faith.”

 

Translation: “He talks too much.” Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary identifies skimble-skamble as an adjective meaning “wandering; wild,” but dismisses it as “cant.” The OED says it’s an adjective, noun and adverb and defines it in the first case as “confused, incoherent, nonsensical, rubbishy.” In other words, a highly useful word, with many applications, that won’t be used. The OED cites later uses by Lord Byron, John Ruskin and John Motley in The Rise of the Dutch Republic. Moldwarp, by the way, refers to Talpa europaea, the European mole. In the same act, Hotspur reacts to Glendower boasting that he “gave the tongue a helpful ornament,” while making fun of “mincing poetry”:

 

“I had rather be a kitten and cry ‘mew’

Than one of these same meter balladmongers.

I had rather hear a brazen can’stick turned,

Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree,

And that would set my teeth nothing an edge,

Nothing so much as mincing poetry.

’Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.”

'Small But Real Pleasure to His Readers'

An amusing coda to Saturday’s post on major and minor writers: "I come from a family of minor writers and intend to join that class in due course. By ‘minor’ I mean something like third-tier–not third-rate, now. What characterizes a third-rate writer is that he can’t write. Not that I would object to being a third-rater myself; many third-raters become fabulously rich, and in any case there’s something to be said for a man who can make millions by doing something he’s no good at.”

 

The writer is Barton Swaim, a columnist and book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. I recommend his book The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics (2015), which manages to make contemporary American politics interesting. The passage quoted above is from Swaim’s “Literary Minority," a column published in 2009 in the Washington Examiner. Call Swaim a comic realist:

 

“The minor writer never gets rich, never achieves anything more than momentary fame, and nobody would call his works important. He has admirers, and he may write a highly regarded book now and again, but he is destined to be remembered, if at all, in the footnotes of monographs nobody reads.”

 

Unless your last name is Proust, to set out to achieve the status of “major writer” is a mug’s game, a delusion of Norman Mailer-esque proporations. In today’s literary culture, it’s a stone-cold impossibility. In Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (2013), Joseph Epstein writes to his friend Frederic Raphael praising the stories of the wonderful Francis Wyndham, an English writer hardly well-known, especially in the U.S.:

 

“Wyndham is, I suspect by deliberation, a minor writer. He wrote well, but was modest in his ambition, not very productive, content to give small but real pleasure to his readers – and, I assume, to himself. Nothing wrong with any of this. To give pleasure is a fine thing, n’est-ce pas? Some of the writers dearest to me – Max Beerbohm, Sydney Smith – are minor writers.”

'Their Worlds Are Closest to Ours'

At the beginning of his 1947 lecture on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – a play he judges “not wholly successful” -- W.H. Auden discusses “the difference between a major and a minor writer—which is not necessarily the difference between better and worse.” This theme preoccupies me. Recently I encountered yet another reviewer who dismisses the author in question as “minor,” which clearly he intends as a qualitative judgment meaning dull and just plain lousy. The designation comes off as snotty and critically lazy.

Auden clarifies things: “We can forget the bad writers. The minor artist, who can be idiosyncratic, keeps to one thing, does it well, and keeps on doing it—Thomas Campion, for example, A.E. Housman, and in music, Claude Debussy.” 

American literature seems especially rich in excellent minor poets (Yvor Winters, Henri Coulette, Turner Cassity, Kay Ryan), in part because we have so few major poets (Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Eliot). As to classical music composers from any country, think of Erik Satie and Aaron Copland. Auden resumes:

 

“There are minor writers who can mean more to us than any major writer, because their worlds are closest to ours. Great books can be hard to read—in a sense, boring to read. Whom do I read with the utmost pleasure? Not Dante, to my mind the greatest of poets, but Ronald Firbank. The minor writer never risks failure [dubious]. When he discovers his particular style and vision, his artistic history is over [also dubious].”

 

Among the first-rate minor writers are Colette, Max Beerbohm, Walter de la Mare, Ronald Knox, A.J. Liebling, J.V. Cunningham, Peter Taylor, Guy Davenport.  

 

[See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]

'The Everyday Dignity of Our Town'

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter / About him at cocktail parties.” 

As a reader, my transformative year came in 1965, shortly before I turned thirteen. I’d been a reader all along, certainly more so than my family and kids I knew at school. But books were strictly entertainment, a natural alternative to television. But that year, after reading his obituary, I discovered T.S. Eliot. I have no idea why he so quickly meant so much to me, why I personalized him as though he were my uncle. Soon I discovered Updike, Kafka and, among other things, the poetry anthologies of Oscar Williams.

 

In one of them I found the poem “Scyros” by Karl Shapiro (1913-2000), fell for it, heavily, and proceeded to read everything by him I could find. At first I concentrated on the poems he wrote while serving with the Army in the Pacific. His collection V-Letter and Other Poems (1944), written while he was stationed in New Guinea. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the following year and he went on to serve as editor of Poetry and Prairie Schooner. I lost interest in “Scyros” and came to admire the most characteristic portion of Shapiro’s body of work. I think of it as his “American Scene” verse, including “Buick,” “Pharmacy,” “Hospital,” “Haircut,” “Girls Working in Banks,” “Manhole Covers.”

 

Shapiro could be silly. He underwent a midlife hipster crisis. He praised Henry Miller and William Carlos Williams. He abandoned meter and rhyme and had good things to say about the Beats. His sole novel, Edsel, is unreadable.

 

Shapiro came to disappoint me, which is ridiculous. He gave us a handful of the best American poems and he helped initiate me into literature. Today, he appears to be virtually forgotten. The lines at the top of this post are from “Poet in Eclipse,” written by Louis D. Rubin Jr., published in the Fall 1991 issue of The Sewanee Review and dedicated to Shapiro. That’s nine years before Shapiro’s death. We all know that the literary industry is driven by fashion, which by definition is fickle and unfair. The entire first stanza of Rubin’s poem:

 

“Prestigious editors no longer chatter

About him at cocktail parties.

Critics do not debate his latest heresies.

The turncoat anthologists have dropped him

From the canon of those who matter.

There is apathy when his books come out.

It has been years since anyone asked him

Why modern poetry is so difficult.

His own clear translation of the everyday

Has long since given way

To more convolute and crepuscular

Enactments of postmodernist despair.

Elaborate candelabra now flare

Where he was once the Muse's bright day-star.”

 

In the third stanza, Rubin celebrates the “American Scene” poems:

 

“Still, there are those who see the lucence

Of what he wrote in much we now possess:

He found the language that could bring alive

The everyday dignity of our town,

Learned to make the astounding adjective

Infuse the colorless, neutral noun

And called into luminous elegance

What all had thought drab hitherto.

He claimed our untitled circumstance

For poetry, fixed its impress

Equally for high romance

As any ivied castle, campus, salon,

Requiring no prelate nor Helicon

Nor claim to privileged view.”

'Distance Only Cannot Change the Heart'

The digital age has enabled a new and more generous definition of friendship. Geographical proximity is no longer a necessary component. It’s a truism that making new friends becomes more difficult with age, but at seventy-three I have more friends than at any time in my life. I’m not bragging. I still have friends I’ve known for more than sixty years but with the internet, distance is erased. Common interests, civility, a sense of humor, temperamental affinities – these become the criteria that shape a friendship, not sharing an office or riding the same bus to work.

 

On July 9, 1785, William Cowper was writing a letter to the Rev. John Newton. It’s typical Cowper – gossipy, affectionate, cranky and utterly devoted to his friend: “No man’s disapprobation would have hurt me more. Your favourable sentiments of my book [The Task] must consequently give me pleasure in the same proportion.” Originally, Cowper intended to write a poem to Newton. Instead, he wrote him a letter and redirected the poem to another friend, Joseph Hill, whom he had known since childhood. Hill was an attorney who served as the poet’s legal and financial adviser, even when Cowper attempted suicide and was committed to an asylum. “An Epistle to Joseph Hill, Esq.” begins like this:

 

“Dear Joseph,— five and twenty years ago—

Alas! how time escapes — ’tis even so!—

With frequent intercourse and always sweet

And always friendly we were wont to cheat

A tedious hour, — and now we never meet,

As some grave gentleman in Terence says,

(’Twas therefore much the same in ancient days,)

Good lack, we know not what to-morrow brings,—

Strange fluctuation of all human things!”

 

Cowper celebrates not merely his affection for Hill but the importance of friendship in general: “Changes will befall, and friends may part, / But distance only cannot change the heart.” He might be writing about friendships formed and sustained thanks to the internet. Cowper’s lines can be lachrymose and rigidly predictable but at his best he is piercingly human.

 

That a suicidally tormented man should have written letters and poems that are still readably charming, funny and moving after more than two centuries, defies the modern understanding of human personality. As poet and man, Cowper can’t be reduced to clinical categories for easy comprehension. Though depressed and reclusive, comfortable only among a small circle of friends and family, and then only in a rural setting, Cowper wrote letters that rival Keats’ as the finest in the language (that both poets suffered lends a plangent quality to everything they wrote, though that alone is not sufficient to explain their literary qualities). They carry philosophical and emotional freight lightly -- never a sermon or treatise, always a conversation. The English poet Norman Nicholson in 1951 published William Cowper, a study of the poet, in which he writes:

 

“His was a strange life and a strange personality; witty, and yet warped; warm-hearted, impulsive, and yet timid and reserved; sociable, and yet solitary; sympathetic, tolerant, understanding, and yet bigoted; gay and yet pathetic; endearing and lovable and yet never receiving all the love he needed. . . . Not even Chekov, carefully selecting significant trivia, could tell us more about his characters than Cowper tells about himself in a chance remark on a hat or cat, a chair or a hare. Strange as he was, most poets are strangers compared with him. His very oddness is so companionable that we can understand his freaks and foibles better than we can understand the normal actions of saner men.”

'The Blameless Life'

How pleasing to learn that friends, seemingly unknown to each other -- compartmentalized as friendships often are -- intersected before we knew either of them. Sixteen years ago today, the late D.G. Myers published on his Commonplace Blog thirteen epigrams written more than twenty-five years earlier. I had no idea David had written poetry. The publisher of the 1984 chapbook A Patch of Weeds was R.L. Barth. The poems suggested how much the two writers had in common, besides a tartly satirical voice and a taste for epigrams – Martial, J.V. Cunningham, Dr. Johnson, Robert Herrick. Here is David’s rendering of Martial’s 3.71: 

“I know, yes. How? I didn’t read your mind.

He’s sore between the legs and you, behind.”

 

And here is Bob’s version of the same poem, included in his recently published Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026):

 

“Naevolus, your boy’s ass is sore; your prick is too.

Although I am no seer, I know just what you do.”

 

Here is David’s “To J.V. Cunningham,” about the poet and scholar David studied under at Washington University in 1976:

 

“Take these, the work of quiet days,

In place of what I owe you—measured praise.

As you have made my mind your own device

To honor you I epigrammatize.”

 

And here is David’s “Dr. Johnson on the Death of His Mother” (Idler, 41):

 

“If you have tears, whoever you may be,

Enough to drop for mourners filing by,

Then let this train be your last cause for grief:

The last steps of an inoffensive life.”

 

David died of cancer on September 26, 2014 at age sixty-one. Johnson writes in the Idler essay cited by David:

 

"The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour tended, is a state of dreary desolation in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.”

'It's a Perfectly Cromulent Word'

“Perhaps you know this word, but I didn’t: ‘cromulent.’ I've seen examples of it used to describe players of different sports.” 

So writes a friend. The word was new to me, so I went to the OED for the definition: “acceptable, adequate, satisfactory.” Not unlike “a gentleman’s C.” You pass but without distinction, like most American presidents. More interesting is the adjective’s extra-literary origin: “frequently used humorously or ironically in recognition of its origin as an invented word in the television programme The Simpsons.” Here is the pertinent dialogue from the 1996 episode:

 

“[Mrs. Krabappel] Embiggens? Hm, I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield. [Ms. Hoover] I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.”

 

The word sounds authentic, a little old-fashioned and stuffy, perhaps Johnsonian. That’s the key to lastingly successful coinage. Forty years ago a fellow reporter and I working for a newspaper in Indiana challenged each other to work arcane words into our copy. I covered courts, he covered city government, so exotic lingo would be conspicuous. Our only stipulation was that the words be rare but legitimate, words that might sound invented. Once I described a county commissioner as “freaming” a comment. The word has a distinguished pedigree. In 1575, George Gascoigne wrote “a Bore freameth,” and the commissioner was certainly a bore. The OED defines the verb fream as “to roar, rage, growl: spec. of a boar.” A timid copy editor changed it to the anemic “said.”

'Nothing So Much as Mincing Poetry'

While reading the history plays again, I’ve been keeping a list of peculiar, amusing, exotic-sounding words, and words I don’t remember having encountered before. I love these choice little discoveries. My only disappointment is that such words are virtually unusable. They would be gibberish to most people, whether in writing or speech, and would end up sounding pretentious and incoherent. Here’s a passage from Henry IV, Part 1 (Act 3, Scene 1), in which Hotspur is complaining about Owen Glendower’s bloviation:

 

“Sometime he angers me

With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant,

Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,

And of a dragon and a finless fish,

A clip-winged griffin and a moulten raven,

A couching lion and a ramping cat,

And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff

As puts me from my faith.”

 

Translation into modern English: “He talks too much.” Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary identifies skimble-skamble as an adjective meaning “wandering; wild,” but dismisses it as “cant.” The OED says it’s an adjective, noun and adverb and defines it in the first case as “confused, incoherent, nonsensical, rubbishy.” In other words, a highly useful word, with many applications, that won’t be used. The OED cites later uses by Lord Byron, John Ruskin and John Motley in The Rise of the Dutch Republic. Moldwarp, by the way, refers to Talpa europaea, the European mole. In the same act, Hotspur reacts to Glendower boasting that he “gave the tongue a helpful ornament,” while making fun of “mincing poetry”:

 

“I had rather be a kitten and cry ‘mew’

Than one of these same meter balladmongers.

I had rather hear a brazen can’stick turned,

Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree,

And that would set my teeth nothing an edge,

Nothing so much as mincing poetry.

’Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.”

'Sweetness to My Sense'

R.S. Gwynn takes a story related by Izaak Walton in The Life of Mr. George Herbert (1670) and turns it into a poetic  fable of humility and service. Here is “Music at Midnight,” published in the Summer 2016 issue of The Sewanee Review and dedicated “After Walton, for W. Brown Patterson”: 

“Mr. Herbert entered, so befouled with mud and shit

His Tuesday consort, ready with their silent lutes,

Were all aghast, save one who asked, with a wag’s wit,

‘Crawled you here from Old Sarum’s pits or on worser routes?’

 

He said, ‘I came upon a poor man and his horse.

The wretched beast had fallen underneath its load;

I engaged to right him and set both upon the road,

And the hour going, in this fair state resumed my course.

 

“‘I tell you this as fact. In all humility

I take no credit for the deed yet must confess

Had I not stopped today for them I could not bless,

In faith, the wafer and the wine. Thus this shall be

For me, music at midnight, sweetness to my sense.

Now, gentlemen, time flies. Let's tune our instruments.’”

 

What a fine way to evaluate a virtuous act and a day of blessings. John Drury borrowed the title of his 2013 biography of the poet, Music at Midnight: The Life & Poetry of George Herbert, from the Walton anecdote:

 

“In another walk to Salisbury, he saw a poor man with a poorer horse, that was fallen under his load: they were both in distress, and needed present help; which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor man to unload, and after to load, his horse. The poor man blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man; and was so like the Good Samaritan, that he gave him money to refresh both himself and his horse; and told him, ‘That if he loved himself he should be merciful to his beast.’ Thus he left the poor man; and at his coming to his musical friends at Salisbury, they began to wonder that Mr. George Herbert, which used to be so trim and clean, came into that company so soiled and discomposed: but he told them the occasion. And when one of the company told him, ‘He had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment,’ his answer was, ‘That the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight; and that the omission of it would have upbraided and made discord in his conscience, whensoever he should pass by that place: for if I be bound to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure that I am bound, so far as it is in my power, to practice what I pray for. And though I do not wish for the like occasion every day, yet let me tell you, I wou1d not willingly pass one day of my life without comforting a sad soul, or shewing mercy; and I praise God for this occasion. And now let’s tune our instruments.’”

 

My arthritis has grown more severe. I’ve used a cane for seven years but the pain in my knees has colonized my right shoulder and elsewhere. On Thursday, while walking to the entrance of the library at Rice University, an athletic-looking young man asked if he could carry my book bag. I was almost at the door so I demurred and thanked him. On Sunday, in the grocery store parking lot, while pushing the cart with my left hand and holding my cane in the right, a black woman not much younger than me, obviously dressed for church, asked if I needed a hand. I declined and thanked her. There’s so much unsuspected kindness in the world.